To Örebro University

Sustainable development as a subject area and learning objective increasingly finds its way into the curriculum from pre-school to university level, and education and learning are emphasized as key drivers for sustainable development. At the same time, the sustainable development discourse has since its inception been met with critique, not least that it is a postpolitical discourse, which favours an instrumental view of knowledge and a simplified view of the relation between knowledge and action. In this article, we focus on the possibilities and challenges of teaching sustainable development in higher education. We argue that it is the formative role of higher education that is particularly important to explore in relation to the possibilities of education for sustainable development. In addition, we suggest that sociology can provide a good basis for both critical thinking and normative action, in ways that reaches beyond instrumental and narrow views of knowledge, human action and change.

The nature conservation movement frequently relies on the lustre of celebrity personae to reach out with its message. As role models, celebrities exercise invisible power by representing certain norms and ideas while themselves being subordinate to social structures and discourses. Examining the case of Conservation International’s campaign, Nature Is Speaking, and guided by the methodological framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis, this study examines how celebrities, in alliance with the conservation movement, (re)produce certain ideas about nature and the human-nature relationship when discursively ‘celebrifying’ nature – turning nature into a ‘celebrity by association’ – by lending their celebrity properties to nature as represented in the campaign. The study identifies three ways of representing nature that the celebrification of nature produces in the campaign: nature as (1) eternal and magnificent, (2) caring and providing, and (3) mighty but delicate. Together these representations constitute a discourse that reproduces certain naturalised values and worldviews connected to the human-nature relationship. The paper concludes that the diversification of celebrity into new fields such as the natural is constitutive of the overall celebritisation of society, and it discusses the implications of the celebrification of nature in terms of reproduction of the human-nature dichotomy and obscuration of the structural aspects of environmental degradation.

This report presents the results from a pedagogical project focusing students’ writing in higher education. Literature in this field conclude that student writing should be integrated in teaching of the subject with a plan for progression. Teachers’ and students’ experience indicate that students write a lot during their education, but only occasionally get concrete feedback on the writing as such. Focus groups with students showed that students found it difficult to write distinct and to differentiate between text genres. The teachers reported lack of ”tools” to help the students to improve their writing. The report suggest a model for the work with students writing based on goal setting; inventory; identifying problem areas; prioritizing; implementation; and follow-up and revision.

In this paper, we examine the phenomenon of representation through the theoretical lens of ambivalence, concentrating on the people involved in representation: representatives. We argue that the theoretical concept of ambivalence can be helpful in analysing and understanding the various tensions environmental and other representatives encounter in their practice. Based on the concepts of “sociological ambivalence”, “ideological dilemma”, and “the organizational centaur”, as well as on insights from social studies of science and sustainability studies, the paper develops a typology of three potential sources of ambivalence: role conflicts, value conflicts, and conflicts between goals and means. In addition, the paper identifies various ways of coping with ambivalence, including the construction of meta-norms, organizational and network support, pragmatism, drawing boundaries for reasonable and acceptable actions, rule bending and discursive negotiation. The paper concludes that the concept of ambivalence adds crucial insights to the positions, practices, and challenges of environmental representatives and notes that ambivalence is not only a matter of tensions and conflicts but can be a source of reflexivity, learning, and agency.

Continued unsustainability and surpassed planetary boundaries require not only scientific and technological advances, but deep and enduring social and cultural changes. The purpose of this article is to contribute a theoretical approach to understand conditions and constraints for societal change towards sustainable development. In order to break with unsustainable norms, habits, practices, and structures, there is a need for learning for transformation, not only adaption. Based on a critical literature review within the field of learning for sustainable development, our approach is a development of the concept of transformative learning, by integrating three additional dimensions—Institutional Structures, Social Practices, and Conflict Perspectives. This approach acknowledges conflicts on macro, meso, and micro levels, as well as structural and cultural constraints. It contends that transformative learning is processual, interactional, long-term, and cumbersome. It takes place within existing institutions and social practices, while also transcending them. The article adopts an interdisciplinary social science perspective that acknowledges the importance of transformative learning in order for communities, organizations, and individuals to be able to deal with global sustainability problems, acknowledging the societal and personal conflicts involved in such transformation.

Literature on environment and representation in politics, management, and deliberation has paid little attention on the people involved: environmental representatives. The aim of this paper is to illuminate how environmental representatives in various organizational and professional contexts understand their role as representatives, and how they are shaped by their contexts. The paper argues that it is crucial to learn about the everyday reality of individual representatives to better understand the limitations and possibilities they face. The study is based on 19 interviews with environmental representatives from five organizational and professional contexts: the state, civil society, business, science, and media in Sweden. The paper concludes that some differences in experiences, for example, in freedom and constraint, can be understood in relation to the representatives’organizational and professional affiliation. Other experiences are common: (i) all categories stated the importance of being impartial and well read; (ii) complex layers of affiliation imply that representation requires sensitivity and adjustment between different situations; and (iii) the performative aspects of representation include the representatives’claims-making, others’attributions, and long-term learning of their role. The article contributes an understanding of organizational conditions and the often paradoxical, layered, multifaceted, and cautious representation these individual actors perform.